Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
During a recent rainstorm I grabbed the fiberglass marker pole at the end of the drain pipe to clear a wad of leaves out of the driveway gutters. Unfortunately, that left me with a finger full of glass fibers; it seems the top of the pole has deteriorated. The first tweezer I plucked from the stash around the pencil-oid tool holder hadn’t had its jaws aligned, so after I plucked (most of) the glass using those tweezers, I did a bit of filing and sandpapering:
Tweezer tips
That’s a millimeter scale in the background: these really are needle-tip tweezers.
A closer view:
Aligned and shaped tweezer tip
It still has a bit of overbite, but it grabs hairs from the bench with no hassle. Given that you can’t get all the glass fibers on the first pass, it’ll come in handy…
So I picked up half a pound of Grade B Madagascar Vanilla Beans from the usual eBay supplier, a 1.75 liter slug of the next-to-the-cheapest 80 proof vodka (“carefully distilled, then filtered through selected charcoal”) from the neighborhood liquor store, and scavenged some bottles from the basement stash:
Vanilla extract bottles
The proper mix seems to be around 2 ounces of beans per 16 liquid ounces of 80-ish proof vodka, which nearly fill the two round half-liter (16.9 fluid ounce) bottles. The flat bottle on the right has the rest of that Devil’s Spring 160 proof rotgut, cut down to 90 proof, with enough beans to make the answer come out right for that volume. The leftmost round bottle has the remainder of the beans in the appropriate volume, which is why it’s half full. The little bottle is that one, minus doses for my hot chocolate & pancakes.
One motivation for using 80 proof vodka is that a teaspoon of 160 proof hooch brings a cup of hot chocolate right up around 3 proof. That earlier batch really didn’t have enough vanilla to be effective, but increasing the total dosage would put a dent in my already meager afternoon productivity…
Although the recipes recommend daily shaking for a month before the brew reaches equilibrium, I’m sure this is one of those exponential diffusion deals that’s mostly done after a day or three. These two bottles show the concentration on the next morning, after and before shaking:
Vanilla extract – shaken and unshaken
Chopping half a pound of vanilla beans on the kitchen cutting board produces an interesting side effect: everything you cut for the next day or so smells strongly of vanilla, as does the entire kitchen end of the house, as do your fingers. Mostly, that’s OK, but we decided vanilla-scented onions were just plain weird and there really isn’t any justification for vanilla-flavored green tea.
It was such a small potato that it didn’t need a nail and, somehow, didn’t get punctured before going into the oven. When it came out, the first touch of the fork detonated the thing:
Exploded Potato
Memo to self: always puncture potatoes before baking!
The shaft that tilts the mixer head has started walking sideways out of its hole, which is not to be tolerated. Looking up inside the base column shows a locking screw that’s worked loose:
KitchenAid mixer – pivot shaft and locking screw
I took the thing apart and filed a flat on the shaft:
KitchenAid mixer pivot shaft – added flat
And then a dab of Loctite on the screw will prevent that from happening again:
KitchenAid mixer pivot locking screw
It’s still piddling oil on the countertop. If you have one of these things, always store it with the head tilted upward. That makes the oil run down the column onto the counter, rather than through the planetary gears into the mixing bowl…
This Watts 9D-M3 Backflow Preventer Valve feeds water into our furnace, provides an overpressure relief, and prevents heating loop water from re-entering the potable water supply.
Watts 9D-M3 Backflow Preventer Valve
The vertical pipe leads downward near the floor, underneath which sits the small plastic bucket I provided to catch the occasional drip. Recently we had an all-hands scramble to soak up a pool of water spreading across the floor from the overflowing bucket, across the aisle, and below the shafts-and-rods-and-tubes-and-pipes storage rack. Evidently the occasional drip became a steady drip while we weren’t watching; not a catastrophic flood, but far more water than we want on the floor.
This is the inlet valve, which is basically a flapper. You can’t see the fine cracks around the central mount, but they’re all over the inner half of the ring.
Watts 9D-M3 – Inlet valve
And this is the outlet valve, which has pretty much disintegrated. Note the outer rim peeled back under my thumb:
Watts 9D-M3 – Outlet valve
A complete new valve is $40, in stock and ready for pickup at Lowe’s, but all I really needed was the failed rubber flapper valves, which they don’t carry. A few minutes of searching reveals the Watts 0886011 Repair Kit, which has all of the interior parts.
Pop Quiz: How much does the repair kit cost?
Answer: Starts at $38 plus shipping and goes up from there. Cheap aftermarket kits run $20 and up, but they’re all out of stock.
Now that, party people, is the sort of thing that ticks me right off.
Perhaps the local HVAC / plumbing supply stores have such kits in stock? To quote: “They may exist, but we don’t have them.”
I don’t see any way to homebrew new flapper valves, so it’s off to Lowe’s we go…
It would seem to me that these things shouldn’t fail after a mere decade of service. I thought that about the CdS flame sensor that crapped out in the middle of a sub-zero January cold snap while I was at Cabin Fever some years ago, too.
My assumption that the basement document safe had an effective door seal turned out to be wrong, so I replaced the bagged desiccant with a tray of granules, sealed the door with masking tape, and tried again:
Basement Safe Humidity – 2012-01-12
The jagged black curve shows the Basement Laboratory temperature trending toward the usual mid-50s winter level. The dead-flat horizontal blue line at 15% RH shows the tray of desiccant can keep up with whatever air leakage might occur around the tape and through the floor bolts.
I cannot find the table (that I once had and know exists somewhere) which lists various desiccants and their terminal humidity levels in a sealed container. I’m pretty sure the low humidity means it’s one of the clay-based desiccants, not silica gel.
A friend asked me to scrub and rebuild an ancient IBM Thinkpad 760XD (there were good reasons for this task that aren’t relevant here), which led to a blast from the past:
Windows 98 Welcome
After Windows settled down from its obligatory reboots, installing the exceedingly complex MWave DSP drivers from three diskettes (!) produced this classic result:
Windows 98 – BSOD
Ordinarily, I’d suggest installing some flavor of Linux, but the 760XD’s BIOS can’t boot from either CD or USB, so you’d be forced to sneak the install files onto the hard drive, hand-craft a suitable boot diskette (!), and then perpetrate some serious fiddling around. That made even less sense than (re-)installing Windows 98.
However, given that exposing a fresh Windows 98 installation to the 2012 Internet would resemble tossing a duckling into a brush chipper, we agreed that this laptop’s next experience should be at an upcoming e-waste recycling event.
The next morning confronted me with this delightful reminder that nobody knows how to handle boot-time errors, not even on a 2011 PC:
Lenovo – USB Keyboard not found
The keyboard cable had gotten dislodged when the USB hub fell from its perch along the back edge of the desk. It’s fine now…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 